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Laser cut rhinoceros

Today, I designed a laser cut model of a rhinoceros, inspired by the designs of Atelier Pierre. In this post I share my Inkscape design files, and I will also explain how you can alter my design for a different material thickness or a different model size.

Sizing the model

Open the rhino_formodification.svg file in Inkscape. Select all shapes and enter your desired width/height of your rhino model. Make sure to have clicked the lock symbol to lock the proportions of width and height. In my example, I changed the height to 150mm, which corresponds to a length of 330mm.

Guide lines

To make sure that we can place the rectangles in the correct position after deciding the material thickness, we need to add some guide lines to our drawing. Enable the snapping functionality and make sure to snap to edges and midpoints of bounding boxes. Create two vertical guides through the center line of the rectangles. Then, create a horizontal guide where the two rectangles meet. Guides can be created by clicking inside the measurement grid on the edges of the drawing area and dragging towards the drawing area. Keep dragging until the line snaps to the desired snapping points.

Sizing the rectangles

From the menu, choose Object>Transform to open the transform panel on the right. Select the rectangles one by one and and enter the desired width in the scale field. The height is not very important, because it can be manually adapted after repositioning the rectangles.

Repositioning the rectangles

Drag the rectangles to their original position, with their center line on the vertical guide and the bottom or top on the horizontal guide. Use the snapping functionality to make the positioning easy.

Finishing up

Select the rhino legs and the top two rectangles and drag them downwards. If you hold shift during the dragging, it only moves in vertical or horizontal direction. At this point, make sure that the rectangles stick out completely of the geometry. This is necessary for the boolean difference operation that we are going to perform. Select one of the rectangles and the shape it needs to cut into. Then, select Path>Difference to cut out the rectangle from the shape. Do this for all rectangles to obtain the final shape. Download this file to see the final result.